Critical issues at the original nuclear lab
First published November 1997 in Physics World As the sixth director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, John Browne faces broad challenges at a critical time in the laboratory’s history. Aft...
Fast spinning pulsar
Frank Marshall, Will Zhang and Eric Gotthelf from the Goddard Space Flight Center, and John Middleditch of Los Alamos National Laboratory found the star by studying data from NASA’s Rossi X-Ray ...
Larger lenses
Despite the popularity of cheap plastic lenses, glass lenses are still essential for many applications. To make a glass lens, a gob of molten glass is dropped onto a catching tool, which compresses it...
Organic laser breakthrough
Organic lasers are attractive for optical applications because they are inexpensive to manufacture, can be grown as thin films and have good temperature stability. Results from the Princeton team sugg...
Light gets in your eyes
To do this Levy adapted a technique used by solar astronomers in which a black disk is placed in the focal plane of the telescope. The size of the disk is chosen so that it exactly matches the SunR...
Fermion first for quantum interference
Bosons (for example, photons) cause constructive interference patterns. This means that the probability that both particles are detected in the same direction is enhanced by the intereference. On the ...
Perrin’s hypothesis reborn
In a unimolecular reaction a molecule breaks into two smaller molecules (or atoms) in a manner that appears to be independent of the chemical composition of its surrounding. The number of molecules fa...
The physics of golf clubs
Golf clubs have an intrinsic attraction to physicists. Not only is the game a relaxing sport, but designing the perfect golf club requires the modelling of some very complex interactions. Manufacturer...
The universe glows
COBE first hit both the scientific and international headlines in the early nineties when it confirmed that the cosmic background radiation followed a blackbody spectrum, and later when it detected fl...
Planet controversy ends
The new evidence is published in this week’s Nature. Two papers, one by David Gray of the University of Western Ontario, and one by Artie Hatzes of the University of Texas, Austin, describe new ...
